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create those substances which grant a person inner liveliness and enlightenment. By this I want to say that a person who is not able to obtain, by adequate contacts of consciousness, the nutrients for vitality, can have only a more sluggish consciousness and cognitive power than a yogi, who is able to obtain these nutrients by the correct conscious contacts. Apart from that, we are arriving by this at the question of decreasing the dependence of conscious living on a body, because living is a phenomenon, which has a much more dynamic nature than whichever organ of the body can demonstrate. The nature of life is superphysical. Therefore, its disappearance after the physical death does not mean the end of existence at all. Life was not lost, only the ties between life and body were severed. Yogis have known this very well and therefore the goal of yoga is nothing less than to make life independent of the body earlier than the physical death occurs. The knowledge of the yogis, that the consciousness can also have as its support something other than exactly the body to which their consciousness has been bound until now, clearly confirms this idea of yoga. It is exactly the supports for the consciousness which determine the entire tragedy or great happiness in relation to death. If a person has chosen, as a result of their belief which they obtained by birth, their body as the net in which they would live, they have to content themselves with the empirical phenomena as the ultimate reality for them. However, many people try to get further. In this case their net will be the infinity in time and manifestations; by that, they will, though, sooner or later, free their consciousness from the empirical reality and therefore will be able to live also without the body. What does it matter that one day it will be possible to find out that life is no longer present in their bodies? If the personal consciousness can, at all, manifest itself in a certain net whose threads are its support, then these people will, by their discipline before death, create a net which is superphysical and which can be equally suitable for their life – just as the body seems to be a suitable net. In that case
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Yoga and Buddhism
it is a subjective matter, however, it does not seem that those, who have forgotten the small net called “body” and begun to live in a net called “universe”, will care about the fact that the physical death marks their objective end. The issue of nourishment is thus, in the first place, a problem of contacts – either the contacts of the physical organs with the solid substances serving as food, or the contacts of the power of awareness with the cosmic essences. Even though the contacts of physical organs with solid substances seem to be primary, still I know from my experience that they are secondary. This is because without consciousness, nothing can exist that could be called a living being. If it so happened that a person contented themselves with consciousness as a secondary existence, still it is only a matter of their choice or preference, weakness and ignorance. This will clearly manifest itself in the practice of yoga. Even though yoga begins with making the body present in the consciousness, yet this state of things later becomes natural and then the next long stage of s elf-discipline comes, which is called operation with the states of consciousness; this self-discipline gives the experience that the possibilities of awareness outside the body are inexhaustible. What does the objective reality matter here? After all, it is as relative as that which we denote by the word subjective – that subjective which always and definitively decides the question of the reality as a whole. From this point of view I must consider the objective reality as a reality which is only conditionally conclusive and everyone should pay attention to stop making a ‘Lord God’ of it and begin to observe and examine, from an impersonal point of view, all happening of which they are a victim. It is only under these circumstances that they will realise that the objective reality is a small part of the universal reality which is waiting to be discovered in the future. And the scientists, caught in the net of prejudice, are arguing for their seeming truth, detected by the technical instruments!
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6. The significance of breath The gaseous nature of air is, to a certain extent, similar to the nature of the substance which the living organisms fix by their awareness. Due to this, the relationships among these substances have the greatest significance in the creating of an electromagnetic phenomenon which manifests itself in contact with the body as the body’s vitality. The only important thing here is that at the contact place of the gaseous or even higher substances on one hand and the physical substances on the other hand, these contacts are a result of the karmic predispositions rather than of the conscious processes. Due to this reason, the creatures live under the law of predestination and the entire process of living is only a mechanical phenomenon. The yogis, who, according to the instructions of the yogic teaching, undergo the discipline of concentration and conscious breathing, actually broaden their awareness up to the place of touch of the gaseous and even higher substances with the physical substances. Although we can not think that, especially at the beginning of the yogic practice, the yogi can carry out the enlivening actions by acts of correct concentration, still we can be sure that the same is being carried out to a lesser extent by the yogic breathing. The instruction which prescribes that a yogi should, besides keeping themselves in the inner calmness, carry out in a precise proportion to this moral effort also the breathing practices, talks about an even breathing in and breathing out, which is supposed to be practised consciously. If the yogi carries out this prescribed breathing in and breathing out, while being aware of this activity and their body in general, they are creating, precisely by the vigilance of consciousness and by a focused attention, a link between the body and the higher factors whose most coarse representative is breath. Thus, if someone carries out the breathing practices according to the instructions of yoga and, at the same time, they are clearly aware of what they are doing in that moment, they have connected
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